The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Bart Ehrman: Revelations about Revelation...and more

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

I have admired Bart Ehrman’s writing for more than a decade. I remember how profoundly reading Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great reminded me of how little I had really understood about the scriptures. For me, Bart Ehrman took over from there. I recalled reading his 2014 masterpiece How Jesus Became God, which made it clear that the modern Western Interpretation of the Holy Trinity differs significantly from the earliest impressions of Jesus, and moreover that the notion of humans intermingling with deities has a long and checkered history. He also made it clear that the Resurrection, perhaps the cornerstone of Modern Christianity, is highly suspect, based on burial traditions at theme. I have been trying to work out a time to record a podcast with Bart for some time, and was fortunate that his schedule opened up recently, following the publication of his newest book, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About The End. This book provides a detailed analysis of the Book of Revelations, and describes how perhaps the most iconic modern interpretation of End Times, The Rapture, is a modern mythological invention and is itself not even scriptural.In our dialogue we explored Bart’s own intellectual adventure from fundamentalist youth to Biblical Scholar, from true believer to skeptical historian. We then explored some of the most enlightening aspects of his writing. It was a fascinating, entertaining, and informative discussion, and one that I hope will be widely viewed. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed recording it. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. In this episode, we all get to have some revelations about revelations. By that I mean my guest in this episode is the biblical scholar, Bart Ehrman, who's written a number of best-selling books over the years that has changed my own and many others understanding of what the scriptures are all about. He's a remarkable historian and scholar, and I've wanted to have him on the podcast for a long time, and I was fortunate enough to find some time in his skis. following the release of his most recent book, Armageddon. One of his other favorite books that I enjoy that we talk about is how Jesus became God. And it describes literally how the biblical Jesus changed from becoming human to divine in the eyes of the early Christians and later on. And it packs some surprises. But perhaps nothing compared to the surprises of his most recent book, Armageddon, where we learn, which is a story about the book of Revelations,

and we learn that one of the most common features of revelations nowadays in popular literature and movies, The Rapture, isn't even a part of the book of Revelations. That's just one of the many surprises and insights that we got in our discussion. And I talked about not just about those two books, but also about his own voyage of discovery from being a fundamentalist young man to ultimately deciding to become a scholar and historian and follow the evidence and interpret the scriptures in terms of the evidence and the historical evidence. It's a very informative discussion. I really enjoy discussing with Bart whenever I've had the opportunity.

And I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did. Now, you can watch this episode ad free on our Substack site, Critical Mass, if you're a paid subscriber and those subscriptions go to support the Origins Project Foundation. Or you can watch it on our YouTube channel. Or, of course, you can listen to it at any place you can listen to podcasts. No matter how you watch it or listen to it, I hope you'll be as entertained and as informed as I was with this episode with Bart Ehrman. Well, Bart Ehrman, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

You're someone I wanted to talk to for years and years, and I have admired you for so many reasons from afar. So thanks for being here. Well, it's my pleasure. Thank you. It's great to be on your show. Well, it's, you know, what I've admired is both your scholarship and insights, into religious history and and and and and that the textual context of of scriptures. But more importantly, your bravery and being willing to say what you deduce.

And and and I think for me that's that's the highest level one can can have is is saying what we know is letting your conclusions, you know, not having them in advance, but actually deriving them. And then and then, you know, explaining where they come from. And at the same time, I must admit, I've spent a lot of time reading your stuff again more recently in preparation for this. I want to, during this podcast also, you fascinate me personally as well for a variety of reasons. I'm trying to understand your attitudes. Now, I know we all have history. And I find an interesting for me somewhat dichotomy between the, I won't say cold, but precise, history. historical examination of the scriptures and your clear, well, it seemed to me to be a clear,

in your heart, love of Jesus. So we'll get there. Wow. Okay then. Okay. But first, I, and as I say, I want to talk about you, written a new book, which is, which is fascinating for me, the Armageddon about revelations, the least, perhaps the least understood book of the Bible, least referred to and for many reasons, which we'll get to. And then I want to talk a much earlier book, which was, I think the first book of yours I actually read, which is how Jesus became God, which is a fascinating historical examination

of something that people don't realize. And I love history of the fact that people assume perceptions were always what they are now. And in fact, books that were written 2,000 years ago, you might expect would have a slightly different set of perceptions. But, um, and, and your, your examinations are historical, not theological. But I want to, before we go into the history of, of scripture, I want to, uh, I want to, uh, go into your history because this is an origins podcast. And I'm, and I, and I, and I want to go back.

So you were born, actually, we're almost the same age. You're born a year after me. In Lawrence, Kansas, which I've been to, I did a tour of Kansas once trying to defend evolution against creation. How'd they go? Well, I think actually, I think we won that, I think we won that, that particular problem. This is when, you know, this is when they were trying to introduce in high schools evolution into the science, I mean, creationism or ID into the science curriculum. And I think we, I think we, we, we, we, we won that one.

But, but it was fascinating to go around in various campuses and speak and, and, and, uh, But you were, Lawrence, Kansas is a, I assume as a religious community. I'm assuming, I mean, your, your religiosity began early, but I wondered, did it begin at home? It began at home. My parents were, my parents were Christian, and we went to church when I was a kid, as an Episcopal church. I think when I was a kid, my parents were maybe more kind of social, socially minded Christians rather than particularly, like, theological or,

anything, but nonetheless, we went to church. And yeah, so, and you know, Lawrence, Kansas, Lawrence is kind of like Chapel Hill is where I teach now in North Carolina. It tends to be kind of one of those liberal spots in Kansas, at least the, because of the university, because the universities, you know, it's a fine university. And there are a lot of, and so the kids, you know, the kids I ran around with a lot of them were university, you know, faculty kids, that kind of thing. Well, your parents, tell me about your parents. where they did they work at the university, did they work at the university or were they there for another reason?

So they met at the university after the Second War, World War. My dad was there on the GI Bill. And my mom just got a scholarship there. So they were both from small towns in Kansas. Neither one of them was particularly academic. My dad was in business and he ended up being a salesman for a box company, paper box company, and made a good living doing that.

My mom was a secretary. and the interesting thing is both my brother and I, my brother's three years older than me, and he teaches classics at Kent State. And so we both do Greek and Latin. Oh, really? Oh, my gosh. From a salesman and a secretary. Yeah. Well, that, I'm often wondered about that. So the question is in the household, obviously you're looking behind you, and I'm a fan of books myself, but, but I mean, I've read voraciously and I always have, but did they, did they,

encourage your love of scholarship reading, for example? I mean, you both became, as I say, academics. Interestingly, my brother and I both did. Neither of my parents actually went to university or finished high school. But was it early on a lot of reading in your house? So what they emphasized was getting good education and because they, they recognized that that's, that was the key to success. They both had come from very small and, you know, not very kind of lower middle class families and knew that based on their having gone to college that they had really, you know, were far above most of their friends from high school. And they just realized that would happen. And so my brother and I just independently, we were very different from each other.

But we went, we went our separate ways. And we both just ended up loving education. So they didn't, they didn't push us very hard that way. They just wanted us to get grades. They just wanted to be educated. But having gone to university, maybe that was the difference was my parents didn't. They wanted us be educated, but they wanted us to be professionals. I mean, if you think about a living, being either religious scholar or a classicist, that's not exactly what you tell your kids, say, hey, go out and become a classicist. That's a good way to have a living. No, my parents were not happy with my brother going into classics because they didn't think there'd be any way he'd ever get a job. And in my case, it was because they thought that they

considered the ministry a noble profession. And they just assumed I was going to be a in ministry. And so that's why they went along with it in my case. Okay. In terms of reading early on, I mean, I assume, well, you say your family was kind of a traditional Christian family. Maybe you went to church, but it wasn't a lot of theology involved at home, I assume. So did you read the Bible when you were younger? No, not really. Not until when I was in high school, I had a born again experience, and that's when I really got into it. But in House, I think they revered the Bible, but nobody, you know, we didn't bother reading it much.

Like most Christians, we'll get to that, like most Christians. You like the Bible and think it's absolutely true, but I've never read it. And I think that's, well, I think in my opinion, that's an essential part of the reason Christianity has been successful. People actually read the Bible, far fewer people are really religious, in my opinion. But in any case, and same as a Jew. I was brought up Jewish, and I was, you know, I went to the high holidays and all the rest. but I don't think I was ever schooled on the atrocities.

I only learned about them much, much later. It was always defending or being or being oppressed rather than oppressing. Yeah. Well, ignorance cuts both ways because, I mean, you know, in your field, you have people who are opposed to, you know, to evolution or we were thinking the year of you created 6,000 years ago. They know nothing about it because they haven't read anything about it. But they believe in Christianity, even though they know nothing about it and haven't read about it.

Yeah. It cuts both ways. Yeah, it is fascinating that sense. Well, yeah. In fact, I want to get to the people literalists who in some ways I've debated a lot of people, including and among the various people I've debated. One of the people I, I wouldn't say respect, but I, remarkably is Ken Ham, who, who at least it seems to me said, you know, we're, we've debated a few times or once on TV and and said more or less the truth, which is, well, if any part of this isn't true, then it's all suspect. And so therefore, you know, and I agree with him completely. Yeah, except for the therefore. Yeah. In any case, you, so you're reading, did you read,

no, if you didn't read the Bible, did you read, you never, I thought, never, did you ever get interested in science, for example, or was you always more interested in history and, and, and fiction or nonfiction. Mainly fiction, fiction, science fiction. So I had terrible science teachers from all the way up. I just had completely really awful. And so I just never developed an interest in science. And I wish I had because now I'm really interested. And, you know, I read stuff for a lay level, a lot of science stuff. But once it gets past the lay level, my brain just doesn't go there. And it just wasn't trained. But reading being interested. I mean, that's why I write books. that's right. I mean, that's the kind of thing.

You know, I mean, I like reading cosmology and physics and, you know, I've been, you know, evolutionary psychology. It's just, you know, various kinds of stuff that's unrelated to my thing. But, yeah, growing up, it was all fiction. I loved science fiction. I liked fiction. That's basically it. You know, it's interesting that you say you like science fiction because it's, you know, it shows how bad schools are. Because if you like science fiction, it should have been a perfect jumping off place to get like science.

because, you know, one is, you know, science fiction and inspires you like science does. In fact, I think that's what more or less what Stephen Hawking said in my book of physics and Star Trek. And it's a shame because that's, you know, those same questions are what, and all kids are excited by that stuff, you know. They are, but you've got to have somebody who shows you why it's exciting instead of like, I mean, and if the teaching is just absolutely boring and doesn't, I mean, oh my God, you know, just get me out of here. Yeah, yeah.

Well, actually. Too bad. My brother wanted me to be a doctor, my brother, a lawyer, because that's what good educated Jewish boys are supposed to be, especially for parents who hadn't gone out of college. And my brother did become a lawyer, which is, but, but one of the reasons I didn't become a doctor is that very same reason.

When I was going to school, around the same time you work, who were your part, biology was just like memorizing the parts of frog. There could be nothing more boring and tedious. And I felt, I feel sad now that I missed out. I mean, I've obviously educated myself since then, but, but, you know, that was around the time when, when all sorts of exciting things were being learned, including genetics and, and the structure of DNA, but no, it was all these ridiculous, you know. So in schools, we unfortunately teach science as if it's a bunch of facts rather than a process.

Interestingly enough, you know, whereas as far as I can tell in, in Bible studies, it is taught as a bunch of people, I mean, I'm always, you know, whenever I've been on stage with people, including theologians, besides apologists, you know, they always remember all the passages. And it seems a central part of biblical training. Another reason probably I was by character naturally turned off by religion because I don't like to memorize things like that. But what was your, I want to, I want to get to the, so you were a rat teenager when you had your born again experience. Yeah, it was probably, I guess. That's probably my beginning of my junior year in high school. I was maybe 15, I guess.

Yeah. And yeah, I was attending a, I started attending a kind of a youth group that wasn't, there was a high school youth group. It wasn't connected with high school, obviously. But it was, and, you know, I was led by a guy who was a charismatic fellow, who big personality, who, you know, convinced people that they had to believe in Jesus. And I thought I did. I went to church.

No, no, no, that doesn't count. You got to have a born-again experience. And so, okay. So I went for it. And that's, yeah, at that point, I became, you know, I didn't come like completely devout off the bat. I've still, you know, I hung out with kids who were, I was on the debate team and I hung over the debaters.

Yeah. I know you went to a state championship by her. Yeah. Yeah. So I like that kind of thing. I was always a competitive guy. So I like, I like sports because they were competitive. It wasn't particularly good at him.

I hung out with the sports guys too. So it's like my life went on pretty much, except for I start. developing this really intense interest in the Bible and in Christianity. But you weren't sort of evangelical in the sense that you were forcing your friends to deal with your Bornegrine. Oh, yeah, no, I did. Yeah, no, eventually it didn't take long before I started. I converted, converted basically my whole family and converted my girlfriend and converted her family, most of her family. Now, which girlfriend? Because you had a Jewish girlfriend for a while, right, didn't you? Yeah, I couldn't convert her. Yeah, I was wondering about that. Did you

try or you did i think right no i didn't convert her her mom was worried we were sophomores when we got together and her mom was worried about our relationship so she moved her to different town so doing it on the phone didn't work too well i i now remember i forget which book i was reading in and but a wonderful episode where you did tell her to sort of accept jesus and she said i've already accepted god why do i have to do it and i think you said you just didn't know how to answer that question it was a pretty good response i was clueled I was just because my whole answer she said well why would I need Jesus I've already got God and I had no idea I said well you know if you got him you might as well take him well it was good training for evangelical I guess but is is so so it was just that it wasn't you didn't have an epiphany or some you know you didn't see Jesus when you woke up in the morning or or I mean it was more the teaching of that of that you want to explain?

I mean, did you have that? But I really didn't have an moment when you felt like Jesus was talking to you. Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yep. Yep. Kneeling by my bed,

accepted Jesus into my heart. My life was changed. Born again. Yeah. One day. And then later in my life, one day, one minute.

Like, it was like there was a moment. There's a point in time. And I absolutely remember. There was a later point in time, maybe a year later. you may not be familiar with this language. I received the gift of the spirit.

So for Pentecostal Christians or charismatic Christians who speak in tongues, and that's another moment. Yeah. That's like a step up. That's when you're ascending the spiritual ladder. So I had that too. Oh, so did you speak in tongues? Did you do Pentecostal?

Did you move from the Episcopal church to a Pentecostal church? No, I state, I didn't, but I did start going to a weekly meeting. in a charismatic group that met like on Thursday night, so with high school and college kids, and we engaged in all those kinds of things. Yes. Okay, now this, okay, wow, okay. And, and, but your friends, okay, so what made the decision for,

you went to them Moody Bible, you chose to go to Moody Bible College, which is where? It's in Chicago. It's downtown Chicago. That's right. Okay. So that was, that's, and that was, That trains people to be preachers, I assume to be.

Yeah, it's a fundamentalist. Yeah, because they still, they didn't know. You know, they just thought, look, you know, he's going into ministry. That's great. And by this time, they also were, had become much more kind of committed as Christians. And so they thought it was a, they thought it was great. And Moody is a, it's a fundamentalist Bible college. And it doesn't, at the time, they didn't give a degree.

And so it was in terms of education about the Bible, it was great. I mean, I learned a lot about the Bible, but in terms of an education, it was terrible. I mean, there's no, you know, you don't take history classes. You take church history classes. And you don't take philosophy. You take apologetics, which means, you know, defending the faith. You know, and so, you know, Christian version of a madrasa, I guess. Yeah, well, that's right.

And strict rules, ethical rules and strict, you know, and it's, um, So it's kind of a boot camp for fundamentalist Christians. What made you choose? I loved it, by the way. I loved it while I'm there. How long were you there? Two years, three years? It was a three year degree.

And so I majored in Bible theology. And then, but you know, I had this thing. I was, you know, I was a pretty good student. I was an okay student in high school. I mean, I was fine. I got good grades, but I wasn't really academically interested that much. But at Moody, because I was so passionate about the Bible because of my religious commitments. I became kind of crazily industries as a student.

I mean, I'd pull an all-nighter once a week just to study. And study would be reading the scriptures? No, I'd be studying for my classes. Were you reading third-party sources? Did you learn Greek then or no? I didn't then. I did after that. Yeah, I went to after that.

But at Moody, I decided I just wanted to spend all the time I could learning the Bible, learning theology, learning, you know, the kind of church history, learning kind of these Christian topics. And I didn't, actually at the time, I thought I didn't want to learn Greek yet because I thought it would take time away from learning the content. Okay. So besides the Bible, when you say learning theology, you'd read, you'd read theological books about the Bible or interpretation? Well, they'd be, so in evangelical Christianity, there's a, you know, there are, there are, books that are just, they're theological books. So they'll be divided into topics like theology of God.

And it'll all be based on the Bible, but it'll be Genesis says this, you know, and Mark says this, and Roman says, and you kind of put together the systematic package from all over the place. And it's a little bit, it's a little bit kind of strange because you're, when you're dealing with the Bible, you're actually dealing with different authors living at different times and, and living in different places. But you're treating it as a, as a unit, almost like, Like, you know, if you're, it'd be almost like trying to study, I don't know, chemistry by bringing a quotation from somebody living in the 18th century and somebody living in the 20th century. And then you're putting them all together into that one systematic thing. And but that's what that's what they do for theology.

Yeah. In fact, I can make a point of people not treating the Bible like a book. It'd be like taking literature and saying, well, I'm going to think a quote from James Joyce and then, you know, another one from T.S. Eliot and another one from Joseph Heller or whoever. and putting them together instead of reading one book. It's an interesting way of thinking. You know, it is obvious. I'm obviously quite skeptical of many aspects. And one of the things I want to get to is why things have been so successful. And I think, I suspect that kind of learning is a really good way to indoctrinate someone

without having them think through the details. Anyway, that's my impression. but um well it's that's kind of right because you you you know if you not if you're not focusing on a particular author or a particular piece of literature but you're assuming that it's like every other piece of literature that it's in connection with then they all sound the same and so it reinforces the idea that you've got this set of these these set of writings that are completely consistent with one another um and you don't have a way of breaking out of that mold so in a way it's a kind of closed system that it's very hard to penetrate because people have this mindset based on how they're

reading these texts yeah exactly and i think that's that you know all of these things work effectively to to um to get you know i mean the point of evangelical things is to get people believing and stay believing and and and i've always been fascinated by how effective religion is i kind of wish in i mean we saw in other areas of human intellectual activity we could get people to um become so, well, actually, I don't want people to become dogmatic, but become so involved. Let me put it that way. But after Moody, that didn't give you a degree.

So you went to Wheaton College, which is also a Christian college? Yeah, it's a very, it's an evangelical college. It's Christian evangelical where Billy Graham graduated. Yeah. And for me, that was a step towards liberalism. Yeah, okay. But it was also a step towards,

if you forgive the towards education because it taught things other than other than the Bible right I mean and no in fact it was a very uh it actually is a very fine school I mean it is it is an evangelical school when I was there they advertised and I think they were right about this that if you take if you look at institutions of higher learning and look at the percentage of graduates who get PhDs yeah they were number four in the country yeah I know I know actually a wonderful physics teacher from Illinois who went to wheat wheat and he's now on atheists, but he certainly went to the time and got a good at.

So they have, you know, education in all areas. Did you? No, so I did have some. Go on. I just can say, I took geology there. It's like, it was the first interesting science class I ever had. My guy who was an evangelical Christian, but he was kind of rolling his eyes half the time about, you know, creationists and,

and what did they call these? what did they call it uniformism? No, what's it called where everything happens the same as it always has happened. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, all happens at the same time, you mean. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I forget the word, but you're right. He wasn't a big fan of the devil putting fossils in the rocks to deceive us all. Have you, by the way, speaking of that, have you ever been to the Creation Museum? Have you? I have. Yeah, I can't bring myself to do it. I probably should. Well, you know, as I say, the interesting thing is,

it's a, it's fascinatingly honest at the beginning and then they pull a switch on you. As I said, I was at there that day, the day it opened. And then I flew to New York to do a TV show with Ken Ham, but they weren't going to let me in, but eventually they did it at the day to open and because I had a film crew with me and I said, do you mind them filming me not being allowed in? And, and, and, uh, it was And it was the BBC or something. And they said, oh, come on in. But it's great right at the entrance. They say, you know, they have two doors and it's sort of reason or faith.

And you choose more or less. It's really kind of. Whoa. And then, you know, and they sneak you through that. And then after all of that biblical history, they take you out. And then they show you how science has basically made the world a miserable place. And then they take you and pretend to be a natural history museum. It's really a, it's really kind of a very, it's, it's, it's, it's well done in that, in that way, but, uh, um, it's generous of you.

Well, it, it's, well, they spent a lot of money on it, but it is, it's, I, I was amazed at the honesty at the very beginning, because if you come in there, he's a reason or faith. Okay, well, I'll take reason, but anyway. Yeah, right. Yeah, well, okay, so, Wheaton was your path towards liberalization, but your degree was your degree in theology? or what was your what was it in? No, I didn't take any Bible or theology there at all because I felt like I'd I'd done that at the place that really knew about those things

and so why would I do it here? But I also, I wanted to major in English literature continued my interest in novels and fiction. And, you know, so I took a number of things that were really eye-opening. I mean, I took courses in, you know, intellectual history, for example. And, you know, just the regular kinds

think you take philosophy and history and and uh english i was a humanities guys sure it's generally humanities i'm given your interest in history you know and as something i share by the way but not obviously professionally as you you must have that that intellectual history that that that that learning how to do critical analysis and historical thinking you got out of that i assume uh yeah that was a big deal and you know it helped that i had done all this debate stuff when i was younger because i always had to look at two sides of an argument and to figure out ways to make make arguments and to take apart arguments. And so this kind of, this kind of education really helped a lot, even though the,

the professors were conservative Christians, most of them. But they, but they, you know, they were, they were smart people who had, who had good training for the most part. Now, do, did you only have to go to a year or two because you'd gotten some credits from, from Moody? Is that the way it was? So you just, and is that the reason you went? You wanted to get your undergraduate degree?

Did you plan then to go to graduate school? Or was it as a result of being in, in, in, you just? at Wheaton. No, already at Moody, I realized that I was, that I could probably go on and do graduate work. And at Moody, my idea developed,

my last year at Moody that I knew, you know, I knew that there were a lot of really smart, smart people who had PhDs who were teaching in Christian contexts, but I thought I would get a PhD and be a Christian teaching in a secular context. And I thought I would be,

this would be kind of a mission field for me. So I had planned that, you know, I wasn't sure what it was going to be. And I wasn't sure if it'd be in English or in biblical studies. But I took Greek at Wheaton and it turned out I was, that was something I was pretty good at. And so I decided to that maybe that was the way to go, is studying the Greek New Testament. Okay. And then you chose to go to Princeton Theological Seminary, which,

You want to, and again, you know, I taught at Yale for a while, and I know there's this school of divinity, which I visited every now and then. But does the theological seminary have any connection to the university, or is it completely separate? It's separate. And the way you distinguish them is if it's a divinity school, that means it's a professional school within the university. And a seminary is a separate institution. Yale Divinity School actually is a very good school. It's not, you know. Oh, no, no, I spent it. Yeah, no, no, I'll buy that.

And a lot of places, most divinity schools, you know, they're academic places. They're training ministers, but they're academic, as opposed to a lot of seminaries, which are not academic. You know, they're really minister factories. And Princeton, though, was both. So Prince, Prince University started out as a minister training place. They all did. And then, then it's. into the university and the seminary.

So they're right across the street, and you can take classes of both places. I was wondering if there's that class during around. When I was, again, in Boston at MIT, I could take class at Harvard. And in fact, one of my good friends, by the way, did a master's divinity, you know, and he was an atheist. But it was kind of like the equivalent of doing an undergraduate liberal arts degree.

He just wanted to continue. And he was able to do it in the Divinity School, which is a good place to be able to do those kind of things. So they're right across the street. Did you take classes at Princeton as well as the seminary? Or did you? Not much. They're a bunch of secularists. What do they know? Okay. You're still, that was still your feeling. Okay.

Well, no, it wasn't quite my feeling. My feeling was that I was really interested in, at that point in my life, I was really interested in biblical interpretation and in the analysis of ancient Greek manuscripts. And those are two things that happened at the seminary. At the university, they definitely had a religious studies program and they had people who worked in. New Testament and early Christianity. But they had more of a kind of a social historical approach rather than a interpretive approach. And nobody over there worked in the specialized field of the analysis of Greek manuscripts. And so basically, once again, I made bad decisions and decided just to take classes at the seminary. Well, it didn't, it, it, it, you came out okay. But nevertheless, actually, it was a bad decision as far as you as a fundamentalist Christian is concerned, because it was there that you began, I think, to see the contradict, correct me if I'm wrong,

but as far as I understand, because you're interested in interpretation, and I think actually, and this is, I think even this is from your Wikipedia page, realized at the time there were over 5,000 manuscripts of the New Testament, and they weren't the same. And beginning to see discrepancies is what began to maybe convince you they weren't divine. Do you want to elaborate? Yeah, that's kind of yes and no. And so the deal with the manuscripts is that I had actually known all about this before, even when I was a fundamentalist at Moody.

I wrote papers on it that you have, we have, today we have about 5,600 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and we don't have the originals. And so we have to figure out what the authors. wrote, since we don't have their writing, but we have these later copies. And one of the reasons I went into the analysis of Greek manuscripts was because when I was a fundamentalist, I thought that God had inspired every word, but I realized there were places where we didn't know what the words were. And so I wanted to find the words. And that in itself didn't lead me away from the faith. What led me away from the faith, from being a fundamentalist Christian. What led me away from that

was places where we were pretty sure we know what the words were. And when you compare this passage with that passage in what seemed to be their original words, they just contradicted each other. And I finally got to a point where I had to admit it that these two passages, they really do contradict each other. And I might as well give up the attempt to show that you can reconcile them. I've been trained to reconcile everything. And at some point, if you're just being intellectually honest, say, you know, I don't

think so. This is a contradiction. That's what made me think. Yeah. Yeah, that's the, that's what I admire. It's the intellectual honesty. I have, um, I actually years later, I was invited back to an event at Yale for the 100th anniversary of some lectureship on religion. And it was me and five theologians. I was the token atheist. But I was amazed at how they were able to, like, do epic circles with an epicircle. They were very, uh, intellectually facile. or not Faso is not the word, intellectually capable of taking things that appear to be contradictions and finding some ways to make them not. And I guess I find your intellectual honesty refreshing, but you probably spring to a lot of that. This is at Yale. Yeah. I mean, at the divinies were,

these were not all theologians, Yale. These were people who came back to lecture about God. One was one was from Notre Dame, a very famous theologian from Notre Dame, for example, and who you probably know. Because most famous theologians and serious biblical scholars, there's nobody at Yale who thinks that the New Testament is without contradiction. Oh, yeah, you know, these were people coming to talk about basically, well, about God. And but I was surprised when I, you know, when confronted with the, as inevitably, I think anyone is, the, the apparent, not just internal contradictions between the script. as different writers write as you talk about it, length in both books and in general. But the contradictions with science. Oh, yeah.

But that's what I found amazing is that they could take these contradictions and turn them around and do this immense set of logical steps from one to the other till they came back and it was all, you know, and apparently made it seem consistent when it wasn't at all. I was I was impressed by their fluidity of that regard, but I'm more impressed by people who look at it, contradictions and say their contradictions, I think. Right, right. Well, that's a trick. One reason it's a tricky business is because I think a lot of people who are sophisticated, who are theologians, think of theological reasoning as in a different sphere from scientific reasoning. And they see that as different from mathematical reasoning. And they see that as different from sociological reasoning. And they think these different spheres have different ways of justifying knowledge and grounding knowledge. And so,

So they don't think some, not all, there's not, there's not like a view about this or millions of views about it. But one view is that it means that you can't really use science to discredit claims that aren't susceptible to science. And so when somebody like, you know, like when someone like Sam Harris or somebody says that, you know, that it just, it's a contradiction of science, that, you know, that to be religious you have to disbelieve science. these people just roll their eyes and say, no, actually it doesn't work that way because they, you know, scientific knowledge. It's not that they really believe there's an Adam and Eve or anything like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, no, but although some. But they think that they're, that God talk somehow isn't kind of confined within the, you know, the ways of science. You know, that's interesting. I wasn't, I wasn't, you just remind me

something I wasn't going to bring up, but it, it, I've, as I say, I've had chances over the years, including at the Vatican, but to speak to many theologians, because I used to get invited to lots of different places. And I always ask the theologian one question, because in my opinion, the theology is not, theology itself is not an area of scholarship, of what I would call academic scholarship in the sense. And I confronted them by asking the phone question. I'd say, give me one example in the last 500 years of a contribution to knowledge that theology is provided. Now, I'm not talking about history or philosophy, but and I know, and I always got the same answer, which, which I guess the way you talk about it makes it clear. Every single time the answer was, what do you mean by knowledge? And I thought that was fascinating.

I didn't quite, you know, it really shocked me at the time, but in the context of what you're saying, it makes it clear. Like what, and, and, and I would always say, well, you know, if I asked a chemist or a biologist or a historian, they'd tell me right off. they wouldn't ask a question, what do you mean by knowledge? And I think in some sense, they have to, right? Because you have to assume somehow, in order to account for all this, you have to assume that there's some distinction

between knowledge and the rest of the world and knowledge of God. Well, you know, theologians do think that they've made progress on certain issues, but since nothing is testable, it's not knowledge in the same sense. I mean, you can't, how do you show that, you know, a particular theological view is right or wrong. And it doesn't work in the same way that you can, where you can do some, you know, some have an experiment or something way. Well, in philosophy, you can, but I guess that's what I'm saying.

I mean, it seems to me what I used to argue, I don't want to be too controversial here or contradictory here. But I used to say, well, you could take theology and you could take the parts for the useful. There's history. There's literary criticism. There's philosophy. There's logic. Put them in their relevant departments.

And then there's nothing left. Yeah, look, I'm on your side on this, but I will, but they would say that you're, that it's different because it has a different subject and it has a different grounding. And I know, people who are not in that world just think, man, that's, I don't know, they stuck their head in the ground. As you, as you've experienced, there's some very smart people doing this. Remarkably smart and remarkably literate and, you know, it's really fascinating to me. And I want to, yeah, well, we'll get to that in the context of your of your writing later because I'm, no, anyway, we'll get to it. I want to go in a circle. I want to start with you and I want to end with you. But if we in six or eight hours from now, no, hopefully not.

Okay, it's all about me. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Well, you know, you're the interesting person that I wanted to talk to. And I, and I've learned a lot just both listening to you and reading you, and I appreciate it. But, but, um, uh, the one of it, just as you talked about the road to belief that, well, it was pretty quick there. It was a burn again moment. You want to talk about the road to disbelief? I mean, you started to get liberal, but when didn't?

And the contradictions was it just the fact that there were contradictions that, that were inherently there that led you to disbelief, or was it, or was it more? Actually, it wasn't that at all, as it turns out. The contradictions opened my eyes to the Bible being a very human book. And so this was probably my third year, my master's program, I started realizing that I just couldn't hold on to a strong evangelical understanding of the Bible anymore. But I remained a Christian for a long time. I did my PhD. I was a Christian the whole time I was a PhD. I actually, during my PhD, I was a minister of a Baptist church,

preached on the radio every Sunday morning and did funerals and weddings and things. Yeah, a Baptist church. So I stayed a Christian. And then I became increasingly liberal, I'd say, I got to a point where I was a very, very liberal Christian, where I believed, you know, I thought there was some kind of divine being in the universe and that Jesus was the way that this divine being could be better understood. The story is about Jesus. I didn't think that we literally knew everything Jesus said or did or anything like that.

But I thought that the guy of the biblical story embraced in some sense, the kind of the ultimate meaning of the universe that's backed by some kind of divine being out there. It is a very liberal view. At some point, probably about 30 years ago, I just gave it all up. And it wasn't because of any of my scholarship per se, my biblical scholarship. It really was because of trying to wrestle with the problem of suffering. And, you know, whatever one thinks as a Christian, I mean, the basic line is that there's a divine being in the world who intervenes and helps people when they are in need and saves people. And I thought about it for a long time, read about it for a long time in various fields, philosophy, theology, biblical study.

I got to a point where I just didn't believe there's a God who's active in the world. You just look around. You look around. Just look around. So clear to me and so obvious. It's just, I mean, there's so much pain and suffering among people who have no, there's no nothing redemptive about it. Sometimes there's nothing so bific about it. There's nothing good about.

And, you know, saying that it's all going to be made right later, didn't do much for me. And somebody has to be tortured now so that they can have a nice afterlife. It just didn't make any sense to me. I finally gave it up. It was after I came to Chapel Hill, I had been teaching here for a few years. You were still Christian. Yeah, I went to the local Episcopal Church and was taught adult Sunday school for some years. So while you were at Rutgers before, then you were still.

Yeah, at Rutgers, I was still active as a Christian and in a church. And so my, you know, it's kind of strange. Moving to North Carolina to become away from New Jersey to North Carolina, to lose your faith. It's kind of the opposite of most people. Yeah, right. Yeah, I know. Who would have thought? But yeah, I know. But I just, I just got to a point where I couldn't accept it anymore. And so, you know, left it. Now, okay, now you call yourself agnostic, or at least written, you're agnostic. But, you know, I wrote a, I actually got, I wrote the forward for a book called The Case for Atheism.

And I had to read the book. It's an old book. So you may know the book. But, but, um, But I figured if I was going to write the forward, I should read the book. And it was the first time he said something that is obvious to me in retrospect, and yet most people, it didn't hit me then, and most people don't buy it, which is agnostics are atheists in the sense that atheists don't have to be, atheists aren't people, there's some atheists who say, everything is wrong. There's no God, I know it, I'm certain, blah, blah, blah. But all that atheism is in principle saying is the stories don't convince me.

I'm not convinced by anything I've read. And that's a whole spectrum, including agnostic. You say, well, I'm not convinced by anything I've read, but that doesn't mean, you know, there's something I don't know about. And do you buy that? Do you agree with that or no? So I have a different view of what atheism and agnosticism are than most people have. Okay.

When I left the faith, I had the kind of view you're talking about, which is that atheism and agnosticism, are kind of on a spectrum. And that agnostics are ones who say, well, I don't really know. And atheists, like a hardcore atheists, there is no God. And with that, when I became an agnostic,

I had no idea going into it that if you do polarize these two groups and have a binary of agnostics and atheists, they really are antagonistic toward one another. Yeah. I just thought they'd all be kind of, you know, the same. But the way it worked out is that atheists all in this, this binary. The atheists all thought that the agnostics were simply wimpy atheists. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They didn't believe in God, but they're too, like, they're afraid to say it.

And the agnostic, on the other hand, thought that the atheists were just arrogant agnostics. Like, they don't know. How the hell will they know? But they're saying. Dogmatic agnostics in a some sense. Dogmatic. But now I actually, I actually, I call myself both an agnostic and an atheist. Me too. Because I think that they're talking about two different things. Agnosticism literally means don't know. Yeah. Greek. I don't know.

So if somebody asks me, you know, is there a, is there a superior divine being in the universe? I don't know. How would I know? But if somebody asks me, you know, do you believe there is? I'd say, no, I don't think it is. I don't believe it. And so I think agnosticism has to do with knowledge and atheism has to do with belief.

But it ends up kind of where you are, too. It means that really, I think both are both. Yeah, yeah, both are both. You know, if we just said atheism instead of atheism, it would be a little bit better because it's sort of basically saying, you know, I don't, it's not, I don't think of it's belief, but rather a lack of belief. Right. Or, yeah, I try to actually, as a scientist, I make it quite clear because I'm asked all the time, do you believe in this and that? And I try, although I don't, I'm not perfect in this regard, in any regard. I try to never use the word belief because, you know, I say things are either likely or they're not. likely. But, but, but from this, if I, if I, if I'm got my scientific, my scientist had on, the belief, there's no room for belief in science. It's, it's, yeah. Well, I mean, that, you probably know. You wouldn't. You wouldn't know better than me. That goes back to ancient

philosophical, Greek philosophical traditions. Belief is kind of a second category of, of, of knowledge. And so that, yeah, I, I would agree with that. But that's why I think there are two different belief. And I would put, I wouldn't say it's actually just a weaker form of knowledge. I'd say, in fact, it's a different category, belief in knowledge. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, I guess, yeah, well, we're going to place hadn't planned to, but this is good. I'll try and get to your books as well in detail, but I hope you don't mind having me a general conversation as well. No, no, I'm fascinated by to talk to someone who's thought about these things in such detail. But see, for me, I'm an old-fashioned kind of scientist, and for me,

there is no knowledge but empirical knowledge, that, that there's no, nothing, that there may be wisdom from reflection, but no knowledge has ever been gained by revelation. Do you agree with that? Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. No, I'm a complete empiricist, too. I mean, I'm a complete materialist.

Well, and you're, I mean, you can see the empiricism in your analysis. You know, if you want to say, you're going to say, well, what could this gospel person have thought? Let's look and, you know, it did this come from their writing. Let's see what evidence we have. And I did find it fascinating. I have to say, I found it overwhelming in some ways. Your energy to be able to explore the details of the scriptures is something I, again, it's by nature. I can't, I would never be able to devote that kind of energy to it.

It's just because to me it all, it just all seems clearly, I don't want to say nonsense, but it seems clearly myth and belief. And I guess therefore I tend to just sort of automatically by disposition sort of discount it. I get that. I mean, it's like spending your life trying to, you know, analyze the truth behind a grim fairy tale or something. Well, what's the point? I mean, it's like it's a fairy tale. But in my case, you know, I got so interested in it as a Christian, that interest continued

because I realized there's a lot of historical and cultural. importance to this material. And I'm just, I'm endlessly fascinated by, in part because so many people completely misunderstand it. But, you know, there are over two billion Christians in the world who believe in the Bible. It seems useful to try and figure out what it's really all about. And it's great. And as my, as my friend, my late friend, the physicist Stephen Warrenberg, also an atheist, would say that in trying to explain that, you're doing God's work. And I would agree. But I, you know, I think it's a really important for someone to be able to say,

honestly, here, let's talk about what's actually here. And someone with, you know, someone who isn't already typecast like me, but someone is willing to think about it carefully and who has the appropriate credentials as well, for whatever that's worth. And that's why it's so fascinating to go through this and see in detail why most of what is conventionally believed is wrong. I mean, when I think about everything from how Jesus was always thought to be God and accepted be God, something you clearly demonstrate in how Jesus became God was not true, to the notion of a rapture and in revelations is also wrong. And I think it's fascinating for people to realize, especially believers, that these things that

they commonly accept, because as you point out, people don't actually read it, are generally wrong. And it's wonderful and refreshing to have someone being able to say that and not just say it, but explain in detail why this case not to be contradictory or mean or disparated, but to say, I want to understand it. And I think that that attitude is great. Well, here, this is one of those places where the kind of the difference between a theological way of thinking, and in this case, it's not scientific thinking, but it's historical thinking. I tend to think it's empirical still.

It's empirical in a different way because you can't. you know, but, but it's, it is empirical, historical way of looking at things that it's different because I can, I think I really can show that the earliest followers of Jesus did not believe he was God. That's the historical claim. But if somebody asked me, was Jesus God, well, you know, I don't believe in God, but I mean, it's not like, there's no way to show that. I mean, I'm like, so I, you know, that's a theological claim that I'm agnostic on. I mean, I don't believe. Although you would, I suspect you'd be willing to say what I would say is that I can't say it wasn't, but it's unlikely. Well, I don't believe it. I think it's wrong. I think it's wrong. But it's not wrong in the sense. Based on the evidence, it's unlikely. Would you say that or not? Well, based on the evidence of the context of the time of the developments that happened before and after that. Yeah, of course. I think it's impossible. I don't think there's a God. How could Jesus be God if there's no God? So I agree that. But it's a theological claim that doesn't.

doesn't have roots in the historical. Yeah. You see, I mean, so the historical record can't help you know about a theological claim. Which is very helpful for religion. And I want to get to it. In fact, I'm going to get to that in a second. I want to kind of ask some, your books made me think even more about how effectively religion, which I tend to think of as a con job, has gone through that con job.

And I, and, but before that, I mean, I understand. And I guess I was going to ask, how can you spend so much time in the detail analyzing each of these things? But I got some perception that. And one, I think in the, I think it's the, I think it's the Armageddon book. But I think you say the New Testament is the most important collection of books in the history of civilization. And that just, whoa, that just shocked me. I think I kind of understand perhaps the context of that. But you want to explain that?

Why do you say that? I don't, yeah, no, I don't think it's even debatable. I mean, how does one measure importance? Well, you measure importance. And when you're talking about cultural, social, not just religious, economic, political. I mean, throughout the history of the West, by far, the most powerful institution has been the Christian church. there's nothing compares with it for the for the long deray i mean you just look at the last 2,000 years which which controlled not just like knowledge about religion it controlled knowledge of science

for most of the centuries it was the only it was the only game in town if you wanted to study it's and it's and it's all rooted in the new testament so what what bookie what book would compare with that well i don't know i i was assuming you came from impact culturally it has had a huge impact. But if you think about let me just let me try and be the I'm willing to buy that, but let me try and be the devil's advocate, which is my natural state. In terms of impact on the modern world, one could say Newton's Principia or Galliol's dialogue to new science, in terms of changing the world in a way that allows you and I to talk across a continent without having to be beside each other. So in terms of changing the way we live nowadays, I could make the argument

that those books, and you say collection of books. So I'm going to say, Brimchipia, the dialogue, maybe, you know, and a few others, works of Einstein and others, have changed the world at least as much, at least the modern world as much, not integrated over history, because it's only 450 or 500 years old. How would you, what do you think? I completely agree. I mean, Principia, I mean, how do you even,

In terms of modern world, more people probably believe in the book of Genesis than the Principia. But there's no doubt. No one exists. We wouldn't. We wouldn't. We wouldn't be here. Our world would not be here. Yeah, so that's why when you said it's the most important.

But I say in the history of civilization. Okay. What about compared to the Quran then, given what's happening in the modern world? How would you compare those? you wouldn't have Islam without Christianity I don't think and the Hebrew Bible of course is massively important but if without a New Testament it would have been a you know it'd been a set of scriptures used by you know a few million people today yeah wouldn't be you know something used by two billion people today well okay so that and I think what I was saying when you're froze is that that I guess

it's in that context that I can understand why you have the energy to be able to go into such incredible depth into each of the words and the statements of people, when you know those statements in some sense are often invented. Yeah, but you know, look, my wife is an expert on Shakespeare. And she goes really into depth. She's a Shakespeare scholar, Duke. She goes really into depth. It's crazy.

And it's not because she believes Shakespeare. You know, it's not because, you know, Shakespeare's, it's, it's, it's, for her, these are powerful texts that can help shape our understanding of the world. Sure. But in a very, very simplistic terms. And the Bible's like that. But, you know, and I think understanding the gospel of John probably is more important to culture and society than understanding Hamlet. If you just try and measure what we're, so for me, it's, for me as a university professor, I think most people in universities, things that they don't believe.

Yeah. In the humanities especially. Yeah. I mean, you know, you teach mid, me, you teach Germany, you know, 20th century German history. It's not because you want to be a Nazi. You think it's important for, for people to have that context. Okay.

And, and ultimately, I assume, I mean, I don't want to hit you with this because it's, look, the reason not most scientists do science is not because they're trying to save the world as I tell you, it's because they enjoy it. So ultimately, you couldn't. spend as many years and as much time and effort as you've spent working through this if you fundamentally weren't fascinated by it. I mean, I assume it's a personal satisfaction that you get from it. Well, it is, but the thing with something like this is that it gets you into other areas that are tangential, actually, to the main thing. So I never, I never spend any, I don't,

I don't sit around studying the Bible. I, you know, lately I've been reading all sorts of Greek and Roman moral philosophy, Aristotle and Marcus Realies. And so, you know, it takes me into these other areas I'm just kind of interested in that relate. But the, so, but the, but the, but the, but the, the bar, the writing has to be on these things that people are really, you know, find important. And, and, and the fact you have reached such a broad audience means you're obviously hitting a nerve. And I think that's right. I mean, again, not that I want to, yeah, people say, I always bring things back to me. But that's why I write, you know, try and connect science and culture, because I think this idea is important,

but I try and reach people in ways that they're intrinsically interested in because they may not be... They may not perceive they're intrinsically interested in science, but they are. And so if I can reach them by Star Trek or some other... Yeah, no, well, no, thank God for people like you,

because, I mean, people like me wouldn't have any interest in science if it was taught the way... I mean, you have to have somebody who can actually show why it really is interesting and what's interesting about it. And as you know, most scholars can't do that. But yeah, well, that's true.

Most scholars can't. But I was going to say, thank God. I don't use those words, but thank God for people like you. And I should say, but remarkably, Christopher Hitchens, because I would know much less about the scriptures if I hadn't read both of you. And because I wouldn't, I mean, I did read the Bible when I was younger. In fact, I read it and I read the grand too, but not with a kind of critical eye. And so I've learned a tremendous amount.

And my view of, I wrote these notes to myself. By the way, I learned something wonderful, which was that religion is, it can be in some sense be derived from the, from, I guess it's the Latin word cultus, Latin phrase cultus decorum, which I just love the idea. And it doesn't translate to what you think. It's not a cult so much as, as a. No, cultus dorm is just the way you worship, worship the God. You take care of the. gods. Yeah, taking care of the gods, but I think, and that's true thing. But what, what came out to me, the key I first thought, maybe not the first thought, but when I tried to put it in perspective, both from how Jesus became God and from Armageddon, is that, as you point out, serious religious scholars know about the discrepancies. They also, as far as I can tell, know, as far as I can tell from

reading, then they know that the key stories that are so central to the religion that people go to church for every week and celebrate Christmas for, that those stories, like the three wise men and the virgin birth, are not, we're not even central to the scriptures. And so explain to me how that's not a con job in a sense. If the people who are doing it know it, is it just simply because they think the ends, they're evangelical at heart and the ends just. the means and if these stories will bring because they believe Jesus is God and therefore anything that will get people interested is good even if it's just even if it's not true even

if it's not true even in the biblical context why why does why does all why do the central pieces of both the rapture but even coming back to the to the three wise men and all the things that I have seen TV shows on since I was a little kid why why does serious people who know though it's not true, allow that to continue as being the central part of most people, you know, they go to midnight mass and that's their religious experience. Yeah, so it's a complicated question because they're, within scholarship, of course, people who teach universities and colleges who teach biblical studies are, they won't agree with everything that I say, obviously.

There were disagreements just like there are in the sciences about this, that, and the other thing. But the basic framework that I operate under is the standard operating framework within institutions of higher learning. Colleges, universities, but also high-level divinity schools and seminaries. The problem is that most people who are thought to be religious experts are not those people. those people who are scholars by and large they teach their undergraduate classes or even their graduate classes but they're not out there you know in a megachurch talking um and so you whereas you've got pastors uh and uh evangelists and such who really are the ones who have the attention to the audiences and most of those people really do believe this stuff they they believe in the rapture

they they're not they're not conning people they really think they really believe it well um they're They're wrong, but they, you know, and they don't, they're not interested in reading scholarship to find out that they're wrong. Yeah, because they know the truth. Not particularly inquisitive. They know the answers before you ask the question. So, but. Yeah, that's it. But, but let's, but there are a lot of Catholics, let's say. And, you know, and I was never a fan. I'm not a fan of the Pope in general, any of the popes. And I know that Francis is like a kinder, gentler version of Benedict. I don't see any real difference. But anyway, but Benedict, you know, I was at the Vatican. And I was at a meeting. that sponsored there on the far future of the universe, which was an experience for me.

But, but, but Benedict was no fool. He was a, he was a theological scholar, yet he ran, and so therefore he knew the contradictions, but he ran, what I guess is the biggest Christian church in the world, right? I mean, most Christians are Catholics, I assume. I don't know the numbers, but I bet. Yeah. So I think in cases like that, the analogies that, the analogies that, works better for, not an analogy, but the example that works better for me is that my classmates,

when I went through seminary at Princeton Theological Seminary, most of them were training for ministry, and most of them, most of them agree, you know, the Gospels of contradictions, there are things you don't know what Jesus really said and did, there's no rapture coming. Most of them will not be preaching about a rapture because they're in fairly liberal Presbyterian churches, but they simply won't tell their people that they don't think there really was a virgin birth. or that, you know, Matthew Mark are contradicting each other all over the place. And I assume that the reason that the Pope doesn't go out with that kind of thing and why these friends of mine don't go out when they're in churches,

they'll go out this kind of thing, is because ultimately they think the religion is not about that anyway, that the religion is not about the absolute accuracy of the Bible. The religion is about a relationship with God through Christ, that isn't mediated necessarily through the Bible. The idea that it has to be mediated through the Bible, that if the Bible has mistakes, religion can't be true, that is a modern concoction. That is not how Christianity is typical then. It's more fundamental on that. I'm not saying, yeah, sure, I understand they don't take it literally and they view it as an allegory for at least, you know,

because they believe in Christ as God. But if they recognize even that even the details of Christ is God are questionable, then is it, you know, what came to mind when I was thinking about this is, well, as I say, I think it's, I assume it's from a fundamental belief that they're doing good work, that the best thing to do is get to people, people to accept Christ in their hearts. And even if they have to finesse it and lie or seduce them, it's still for their own good. And therefore, it's okay to, to, and you know what came to me was, remember a few good the movie. Did you ever see that with Tom? Just reminded me of Jack Nicholson. It reminded me of a kind of gentle version of Jack Nicholson saying, you can't handle the truth.

You can't handle the truth. You need me here. Right. Yeah, I got it. Yeah. Great movie, but I thought. Yeah. But that came to mind. Do you think that's it that they're thinking that people, if most people saw the contradictions, they would give up their faith? Yeah. No, that's just right. They give up their faith and the person and the pastor loses the job. It's a job security issue as well. Yeah. And so it's a, it's a, it is a very big problem. Yeah. No, I, I, I, I, I, I, I do agree with that. And it's

frustrating to me because I, you know, back when I used to, I sometimes still talking churches. And, there'll be a church there and I'll, I'll go and give some, uh, talk and there'll be people listening to my lecture and somebody will come up, this elderly lady will come up to me, been in the church for like 70 years of her life. And she come up to me. She's a, well, I've never heard this before. And I'll look across. I'll see the pastor. I said, you know, that guy actually is in the same class as I was then. The reason you haven't heard it is because he's afraid to tell you. That's why. Yeah, no, that part's not good. And the, and the thing is you can, you know, it's very hard. There's a because you're trying. Dan, the clergy project, as you know, I'm sure. Yeah. And I met a lot of people

who, yeah, that's their livelihood. And not legal, just their livelihood. That's their place in the community. And their wife and their or husband and children, you know, they would be ostracized if they, there's all sorts of pressure to not speak about even one's own doubts. Well, I think before somebody gets to that point, they probably are on the point that you were talking about. They think that they can do a world of good for these people. And so they're, you know, in some ways, you know, I've wondered, I don't know enough about your world,

but I mean, I imagine there are probably people who don't subscribe to scientific orthodoxies like a big bang or something, but they still teach it in their classes. I hope not. Really? I mean, I don't, you know, the only thing I know of are people who, and again, it's only, it's only because of religious belief, there are people, because I firmly believe people can hold two completely contradictory ideas in their head at the same time. Not only do I believe that, I know it. I can see it. You know, Richard Dawkins talks about geologists, friend people he knows, who literally believe the Earth is 6,000 years old and then go in the laboratory and work on these. you know, 100 million year old rocks.

Yeah, so I didn't mean it like that. I didn't mean like that. Yeah, no, I didn't mean it like that. I didn't mean that somebody like is a fundamentalist who believes that God created the world, but teaches the Big Bang. I meant that they subscribe to some more complicated theory. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, I like to think they would talk about it. I think, yeah. You know, it's not, it's, I guess the difference. And to some extent, I notice it's in the kind of scholarship. It's not subscribing to theories. and it it it i think it's i've seen it in in theologians and philosophers not and historians to some extent referring often saying this person thinks this and this person thinks that and you know taking you know in their scholarly work referring to individuals and and and and what they say but of course in

science you that's just not the way it is so i don't think of subscribing to a theory i think it's it's um the people aren't important. And moreover, it's, it's, you know, you can, if you, there are areas of science. In fact, my new book is all about that. It's the edge of knowledge. There's areas of science where we're at the limits of what we can say. We know. And we know things. We know what we don't know. The book in England's called the known unknowns. And that's where there can be vigorous, vigorous debate. But no one, I think, you know, well, actually, there are debates about things like even whether quantum mechanics is fundamental. But I think, I guess the point is that people who view it as not being fundamental are open about it. There's no need to sort of teach in class. I mean, you know, I was just had a dialogue with a wonderful physicist, Tim Palmer, who's a meteorologist and climate science.

But he actually thinks that quantum mechanics is not fundamental. But he would teach quantum mechanics in a class. but what he would say is, and this makes it appear that a classical world is impossible, and then I think he'd explain why he doesn't think that's the case. But anyway, it's a slightly different kind of... Yeah, no, it is. I don't think you subscribe to schools of thought. I mean, there are fads in science, absolutely.

And science is a... Scientists are human, although most people don't realize it. And, you know, so people are driven by fads and preferences and peer pressure and all sorts of the rest, the same sort of things. So the analogy I was having in mind is that, Sometimes when you teach something, you teach something that actually isn't literally right. But the person has to know this so that you can build on it. And you don't tell them this isn't literally right.

You just teach the thing. And then at a later stage, they learn. And I think a lot of pastors are kind of like that. You know, they're saying, you know, in their head they're saying, this isn't, this really isn't. But you've got to know this before I can go beyond it. I'm not sure a lot of pastor, but I think there are pastors like that. that who are well trained and smart and and just don't want to kind of blow somebody's mind before kind of getting them ready for it. I sound like an apologist here. Yeah, well, no, I mean,

you're just more generous than me, I think, but it's nice. I think it's nice to assume the best in people until proven otherwise. And I think that I've have to say, I mean, I can't, when I read you, I can't help but think that your Christian background, you know, affects the way you're the way you're willing to view others in a good way in a good way and and and and and as I do think that that that that you know religion can can do good things for people I just think it does more harm in my opinion and that's my problem but but but no I don't agree with that but it's yeah you don't because I don't think it I don't think I think that the harm that religion I think I think I think religion does horrible, horrible things.

I think it does a huge amount of harm. I think that same amount of harm would be done if people didn't have religion as an excuse. They would use something else as an excuse. Okay, that's interesting because, yeah, Weinberg's quote, which is, I've always resonated with, which I never get exactly correctly,

said they're good people and bad people. And I know you talk about that. You really, at the end of one of your books, you talk about you really believe in good and evil, and that's fundamental. And it's an interesting idea because I'm not, even there I have, I'm not 100% certain agree. Well, I don't believe a metaphysical good and evil. I mean, it's not that I think it's a metaphysical category.

But I think that, you know, I think somebody rapes and tortures somebody is evil. Yeah, absolutely. But I think what Weinberg was said that there are good people and they're bad people, good people to good things, bad people to bad things. When good people do bad things, it's religion. That's what he was. Okay, well, it's a good line. It's good, you know, I mean, when, you know, religion right now, I mean, white nationalists are using religion like crazy.

And, but, you know, my view is that what it does is it gives them leverage, but they would have found leverage somewhere else if they didn't have the religion. Yeah, yeah. You know, I think for a lot of people, I think that's true. Now, I want to actually get to the heart a little bit more of the meat of each of those books. We've been Johnson. No, but I think this is, I hope you agree. I think this kind of discussion is useful for people here too. But, but I do want to give you. I want to get to the meat of this because I think there are, you know, I think some of the general issues we've been talking about will, you know, will come up. And I want to start with how Jesus became God. I want to go through each maybe, you know, my hope is that just for your sake, that we'll go, you know, about two hours if that's okay with you.

And so, you know, half an hour, a next half hour of that or 40 minutes of that. and then I want to come back to you again at the end. If it's okay. So the central premise of that book is that the Jesus that most people think of, as the Jesus said, has always been, as the God and the Trinity, the complex existence of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost altogether and always having been in existence, is not the Jesus. the historical Jesus or the Jesus that's arisen from the Bible.

And at the same time, the, what I loved about, the beginning of how Jesus became God, not quite the beginning, but in chapter one. And, um, uh, you talk, you, you talk about, uh, you give it, you tell you, you talk about a, a, a, a story. And you, and you give this story, which I just had, here, and of course I've lost it, but I'll get again again here, right at the beginning of chapter one.

And, okay, here we go. And you say, well, you know, there was a guy, let me, here we go. Before he was born, his mother had a visitor from heaven who told her that her son would not be mere mortal, but in fact would be divine. His birth was accompanied by unusual divine signs in the heavens. As an adult, he left his home to engage in an itinerant preaching, ministry. He went from village to town, telling all who would listen that they should not be concerned about their earthly lives and their material goods. They should live for what was spiritual and eternal.

He gathered a number of followers around him and became convinced he was no ordinary human, but he was the son of God. And he did miracles to confirm them in their beliefs. He could heal the sick, cast out demons and raise the dead. At the end of his life, he aroused opposition among the ruling authorities in Rome and was put on trial. But they could not kill his soul. He ascended. to heaven and continues to live there till this day to prove that he lived on after leaving this earthly orb he appeared again to at least one of his doubting followers became convinced in fact he remains with us even now later some of his followers wrote books about him and we can still read about him today but very few of you will have ever seen these books and i'm what and of course you're

talking about a paulius right um and apollonius of tiana yeah yeah and so the the fact that you know i've talked to people who say that not only are the Kim's Jesus as God, but his story is so unique that that's one of the reasons they believe that. And in the historical context, it wasn't that unique a story at all. I mean, and, and so let me, let me turn it to you. Well, that's right. I mean, people today, you know, if you talk about a miracle working son of God, there's only one one option in mind. But yeah, that's part of the point of the book, is that in Greek and Roman worlds, there were a number of people talked about like this, who had miraculous births, who had unusual powers, who were brilliant teachers, and, you know, who ascended to live with the gods at death. And so there, we have stories

of others like that. So nobody exactly like Jesus, of course. I mean, but nobody's like anyone else. I mean, they're all different stories, but they have these, they have these things in common. And so the idea that Jesus was the son of God for ancient Christians didn't mean that he was, you know, that nobody had ever heard of such a thing, that he was superior son of God. There were actually people who wrote books about trying to argue which one of these was better, Jesus or Apollonius. And why did Jesus, when do you think?

Was it just an accident of history that Jesus won, or is there something more fundamental? Well, there are a number of things. So I actually have a book on this that's called The Triumph of Christianity that tries to explain why Jesus and not something else. And the deal with Jesus is that there are two things. One is that the followers of Jesus said that if you accepted him and believed in him as the son of God, you couldn't follow any of the other religions. And everybody else, you know, 95% of the world was pagan, worshipping many gods. And in those cases, if you decided to start worshipping Apollonius, you didn't. stop worshipping Zeus or Apollo or anyone else.

You just, you accepted somebody else. But if you start worshipping Jesus, you got to get rid of everyone else. And so Christians maintained you had to do that. And if you didn't, you would be damned forever. And so what happens is Christians become missionary, whereas these other religions have no reason to go out and convert anybody because, you know, it's all good. And they were exclusivistic. They believed that you had, there's only one way.

And since you, the combination of those. too ended up leading to whenever Christianity would convert people, those people would be lost to paganism. And you do that for a few hundred years. And pretty soon Christianity just takes over. You just reminded me of a book that I read by a biblical scholar, I guess, by a woman who basically talks about how more than any other religion, Christianity effectively, in a very short time did away, methodically did away with every other religion, you know, made a point of tearing down the temples. I forget her name is Maxwell. You probably know her work, Catherine. Yeah, by the time you get to the 4th century, when Constantine converted, he didn't make Christianity

the official religion of Rome, but he made it an acceptable religion. And by the end of the 4th century, Christians are about half of the empire. And since they think God has rejected the other gods, They go after temples and idols and priests. Yeah, they very quickly, I mean, more, well, maybe not more rapidly, but what is surprising is they go, they flip very quickly from being oppressed to the oppressors. And when they do that, they give up there. When they were being oppressed, they argued for a separation of church and state. You know, the state shouldn't have anything to do.

Once they become the majority, they gave up on that idea. You don't get it again until the enlightenment of separation of church and state. Well, you know, to jump around again in the Armageddon, to some extent one makes the case. And although you don't say you completely subscribe to it, that part of all of this was jealousy or desire for wealth and power, that revelations and the and the judgment was was basically saying, you know, and Rome being the whore of Babylon, and was basically saying we don't have a piece of the pie, but just wait, we're going to get it all eventually.

Yeah, I know that, I think that's pretty clear in Revelation. It's driven by the desire to have what Rome has. They're unbelievably wealthy. They're unbelievably powerful. They're oppressing everyone else. And, you know, we're the good guys. We're the ones who should have all that. And so in Revelation, the Christians end up with a city of gold that's half the size of the United States.

Yeah. And they rule the rest of the world with a rod of iron, and now they've got it. And so the whole point of the book is, you know, it's awful for you now. But man, you're going to be on top pretty soon. Yeah, well, and that's kind of interesting because that, as you point out, and I was kind of intrigued because you took it to a certain point. And then it got me thinking. I'm just amazed that the book of revelations is in Scripture because it certainly seems to depart from the Jesus that you hear about

who talked about exactly, at least, who is purported to have talked about exactly the opposite, that you want to give up all oily possessions. And even in heaven, it wouldn't be a matter of cities of gold. It would be sort of eternal service to each other. And you'd be rich because you'd have the love of, I don't put it as well as you did, but you'd have the love of an infinite number of members of your new family. Yeah.

No, I think people, you know, Jesus says things like, you know, sell everything you have so that you will have treasures in heaven. And so people think, well, that means, yeah, well, you know, I've got this $200,000 house here, man. I sell that thing. I'm going to have a $200 million mansion up there. Okay. And so they're completely misunderstanding. Jesus, Jesus point is that the material things are not what you're supposed to. be striving for, but in the book of Revelation, oh, man, it's all about getting those material things.

So why, but that's my point. It is so contradictory to the rest of, well, not completely to the rest of the scripture. And I think I want to get there because I'm still shocked that you find Jesus to be such a good guy. But anyway, he's a good Jewish boy. A good Jewish boy, but I mean, anyway, we'll get there. But I think he talked about retro, you know, of judgment and anyway, we'll get there. But, um, but, but revelations is so apparently different than the rest. I don't understand why how it how why the story of why it was eventually included into the into the new test. Yeah. Well, the first thing to say is that had difficulty getting in for two reasons. One was church fathers who were making decisions

about these things. We're not sure that it was written by the same author as the Gospel of John. They assumed that had been written by John, the disciple of Jesus, John, the son of Zebedee. But they had reasons for thinking that Revelation was not written by that same guy. One thing is some of these people were very good linguists, and they looked at it, and they said, this is not written by the same author. It's not very good writing. It's not very good writing.

It's not very good writing. and then you said it was very low level. I mean, the grammatic. I'm sorry to drop back. Last time I taught a, well, I taught a class, a classics class for undergraduates. And I had my Greek students read Revelation just chapter one and list all the grammatical mistakes. And so, you know, just like, you know, these Greek students could do it.

And so it's not very good. Whereas John, the gospel of John is, you know, isn't like that. It's, it's not, you know, super high level Greek, but it's, it's good. good, it's good. And so, but Revelation's not. So they thought, well, it doesn't look like it was written by an apostle. But the biggest problem they had in the ancient world, the ancient Christians, the biggest problem they had was not that it contradicted the Gospels in terms of, like, domination theories and stuff. The reason they didn't like it is because when it talked about what the Christians were going to get after the judgment day, they're going to get this enormous city made

completely of gold. And it sounds like they're going to have being having banquets every night and just kind of reveling in all the wealth they've got. And by the fourth Christian century, most Christian leaders were urging an ascetic life where you deprived yourself of, of pleasure, whether it's a good drink or sex, or you deprive yourself because those aren't the things that matter. And they thought revelation's teaching just the opposite. And so that's why.

they didn't, they almost didn't get it in. But you ask why it did get in for a weird reason you would, you would never expect. And one of the reasons that got in is because in the fourth century, they were having these debates about whether Jesus is really God or not. And if he's God, most everybody thought he was God, but is he really equal with God, the father? I mean, he must be a subordinate divinity, right? I mean, he's got to be like a second rate.

He can't be as great as God. But some Christians were saying, yes, he is as great as God. And they could use Revelation to prove it because in the book Revelation on several occasions, God says, I am the alpha and the omega, the first and the last. So like he's before and after all things. And at one point, Jesus says the same thing. Yeah. I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. And so theologians said, they're claiming equality.

so they are actually equal. And so weirdly, the book Revelation was useful in theological controversies of the 4th century, so they put it in. You know, that's why, by the way, it was an accident that I read both those books together, but I found it interesting juxtaposition because one book is exactly about that contest to try and decide what level of God Jesus was, the whole books about it. and the other is in some sense, revelations is in one of the, as you say, one of its purposes is to, is to ultimately one of its utilities.

I'm not sure it was the purpose of why it was written. But one of its utilities is to reinforce that notion that Jesus is God, is not just a, you know, a subordinate or something else. By the way, you hit something there when you talked about the Greek too, which relates to go back to this how Jesus became God. The Greek of the John who wrote Revelations is poor Greek. The other Greek is good Greek. But as you point out, that demonstrates that it can't have been written by the people who were involved who were largely illiterate at the time. So the people who are writing are obviously a whole different level of education and disconnected from the actual

events of the time, right? Yeah. So the Gospels are normally dated by historical scholars to, well, Mark is usually thought to be the first gospel written around the year 70 of the common era, Matt and Luke about 80 or 85, and John toward the end of the first century 90, 95. But Jesus died in the year 30. So there's about a 40 to 60, 65 year gap between the accounts and the events that they narrate. And they're written by people who are highly fluent in Greek, Jesus followers were low, low class peasants from Galilee who spoke Aramaic and almost certainly did not have an education of any kind, let alone the ability to compose writings, let alone to be able to compose writings in a foreign language like this. And this is, they're clearly not written by

the followers of Jesus, but by people who decades later had heard stories about Jesus. And so this is the big, this is the big task of scholars of historical Jesus, given that kind of source, how do you know what in these sources is historical and what in them is to things made up or exaggerated by storytellers in the intervening years? Well, this is my question, though, wouldn't automatically, when you hear that, especially when you know the sources, sources are oral, uneducated people who firmly, you know, believe what they believe, doesn't that automatically wouldn't doesn't shouldn't there be a radar that comes up and say automatically it's suspect? I mean if if you were to look at almost any oral history

beyond later 30 years later much less 30 years later or a century later if it's not written down and it's it's it's the original stories are true believers it should all be suspect and I don't quite understand why that isn't the the prevailing assumption. It is. It is among scholars. So, I mean, historical scholars, this has been an issue since the 1770s. I mean, when the Enlightenment hit, it didn't just hit science. It hit history as well. And in the 1770s, you have people starting to write about what to do with these sources

because they're clearly documents of faith. And as time develops, people realize more about the oral traditions and things. And that's so historical scholars have to use fairly rigorous criteria to to work through the Gospels to decide what we can say with some assurance relates to the historical Jesus. And you can do it. I mean, because it's not different from what you have for for most ancient, ancient figures. You've got sources written decades later by people who didn't know them, but they've heard them heard about them. And there actually are criteria you can use that make pretty good sense to try and figure it out. You talk about a QML looking for looking for independent stories, independent textual statements, writing styles, etc.

That might suggest that the story is independently coming. It's hard. Yeah, work. But it's hard work and it isn't the same as. But even if you, I guess I'm going back. So I can see the detective work, and I admire the detective work of people who are willing to look at the text so carefully analyze them and decide which sources are pre-scriptural. But even when you've done that, the question I have is, wouldn't you say, I mean, so you can say, yes, these are as close to the things the apostles might have been saying as anything at the apostles at the time. but because they're oral statements of people who truly believed, even, you know, even if you can

focus in and say they're as close to the time as possible, they themselves are automatically suspect. I mean, in some sense, why, I guess the question is, well, it's really the question of why we have religion. Why do people, are people so willing to believe stories that are handed down, um, you know, I think of more recently the Mormon story, which is so obviously ridiculous, but is, you know, growing by leaps and bounds. And why do you think it is that people grasp on and are willing to believe these stories without substantiation? Well, I mean, how many people have actually gone through the equations for general relativity?

There's a difference, though. I agree with you. You have to believe. the difference is they yeah no no no no no I'm not I'm not I'm not I'm not no I'm saying I mean so you people believe it because my cell phone is a GPS and the GPS wouldn't work if I didn't incorporate general relativity but they don't know that no but they don't know they if you say E equals MC square people say yeah that's right you know you then you explain what it means and they say oh okay yeah that's what the C stands are oh it's a You know, I agree with you there. But they, so they know, so you're asking, why do people believe this?

It's because people believe what they're told. And, and so, so I'm not saying historians believe it because somebody told them. Historians have to dig down, just like scientists have to dig into the equations or mathematicians, or, I mean, people have to dig into the stuff. And with the difference is that you do have an iPhone. And as you pointed out earlier, theology hasn't. come up with new knowledge. It doesn't come up with new knowledge. So that's a big difference. But historians, historians, what historians do is different from what scientists do.

Historians have to establish what probably happened. Yeah, yeah. And, and, and there are some things that are more probable than others. And so historians establish levels of probability. In that way, it's kind of more like a court case than it is, uh, than it is like a, scientific experiment. Well, no, I would say actually, I'd say it's almost exactly the same. It's just different qualitative levels, but I mean, or quantitative levels, that way. When we do a scientific science experiment, we'd arrive at certain levels of likelihood. And now our likelihood is much greater because we can test it. But it's still levels of probability. This is most likely true. This is extremely likely to be true. But you also, you can also base it on predictions that you make.

And history doesn't make those predictions. No, but hold on, but you do do it. I've argued with people because I admire history so much. You do make predictions, and I think you're describing the book. You predict that you predict, you say this part of the gospel, I think is prescriptural. And I can predict that if it's the case, I'm going to see something similar from the same kind of linguistic or the same poetry. in another gospel. So it's likely that that poetry preceded both of those written things.

So you're making predictions about things that you're going to say, I think this particular phrase or this particular stanza is significant and probably is more likely to be original. See, I don't think it's the same. I don't think it's the same because I'm looking at, I don't make a prediction that'll be there. I notice that it's there and I draw the conclusion. I don't make a prediction about what that something is going to be discovered later and it turns out that it's confirmed.

Have you never, if that never happened to you? I'm just wondering. Oh no. I mean, yeah, no, of course. I mean, but there it's kind of, it's more it's not a prediction. Yes, but I'm, it's different. Because all we have are the all we have are the all we have. We can't look forward to what it's going to happen in the future of that past event had happened. Yeah, yeah, no, and in fact, the reason I'm harping on this is because is partly because I want you on my side here because, you know, when I've debated about evolution there, we say, well, that's historical science.

Historical science is different than chemistry. You know, talking about, you know, the early history of the earth, that's historical science. But my point is they're exactly the same. Whenever I'm doing an experiment, I'm talking generally about past results. I'm interpreting yourself. You're the scientists that you would know,

but I don't think it's a same thing. it's the same. I don't think that using something like Bayes' theorem for evolution or something is the same as doing a chemical experiment. No, I guess what I'm saying, when I even make, in historical science, I make predictions. In historical science you do, yes.

Yeah, yeah, you know, I make predictions that, you know, there's be a fossil that's a, you know, a missing link and you find one, you know, and that's... Well, that sometimes happens in history, of course. I mean, it happens, yeah, yeah, of course. But it doesn't happen very much with the kinds of things we're talking about. It happens in other things.

I mean, it happens in what was my field of expertise, Greek manuscripts. You can predict that probably there's a manuscript that words things this way. We just don't have it yet. And then low and hold, it'll turn out. I got that sense in reading your book. When you talk about looking in the detailed Greek, probably I expect this is there. And I found that fascinating. As I say, I was amazed by the amount of energy required to do it.

But nevertheless, but just take, you know, maybe spend three or four or five minutes talking about how Jesus became God in the sense that there were these, that the early, there's a difference between John and the John of the Gospels and not the John of the Revelations and the earlier Gospels. And take us through how you think that evolved. So the deal is, is that we have the, you know, we have these four Gospels and that some of them are, you know, they're written at different times. And the, the earlier Gospels appear to be based to some extent. on yet earlier written sources. And so in some ways, you can line these things up chronologically.

And when you do that, and you look at the very earliest materials we have in the New Testament, when you do that and you see how they talk about Christ, they don't talk about him as somebody who pre-existed, somebody who called himself God, somebody who was born of a virgin. the earliest materials, if you line them up chronologically and you don't base your chronology on these views, you have other grounds for establishing the chronology. Once you establish the chronology, you'll notice that the earliest forms of the Christian tradition indicate that Jesus became a divine being at his resurrection.

And the idea there is that he's a human and God was very pleased with him, and so he took him up to dwell with him up in heaven. That's a view that you get in these Greek and Roman myths about other people. Yeah. That when a person is taken up to heaven, they're made immortal. In Greek and Roman, a synonym for God is immortal. And so it's somebody who can't die anymore. So the earliest Christians thought that's what had happened to Jesus.

You get it in Jewish traditions too, by the way. You wouldn't have learned this probably in synagogue or anywhere, but in the ancient world, you also have Jews who were taking up to God to be made divine beings. Interesting. Yeah. But so these Christians, that's the original idea. Jesus was exalted because of his service to God, his righteousness, he was taken up and made a divine being. That over time, people started trying to figure out, well, you know, surely he wasn't just made divine after his death.

He must have been like divine down here sometime. And so, you know, did all those miracles. What's that all about? And people started thinking, well, he was made a divine being at his baptism when he started his ministry. When a voice came from heaven and said, you are my son, today I have begotten you. And then you find that in the Gospel of Mark. And then you get further and you get people saying, well, he must have been divine. He must have been divine his whole life, right?

And then you get stories of the virgin birth where he's divine because God has made Mary pregnant. And so he really is divine. He's like, you know, God, he's immortal by his blood or something. And so, but then you have people think, well, he must have been divine before he was born. He must have existed before that. And then you get the Gospel of John where Jesus exists from eternity past and creates the universe and then becomes a human. So there, it's not that a human that's exalted to be divine, but that a divine being has come down to be human. And so those are two kind of basic ways of understanding who Christ is.

One is that he's a human that gets exalted, and the other is that he's a divine being who becomes human. And all of that's happening within the first 70, 80 years of Christianity. And in my book, I try to talk about how it even goes farther than that then. And to God in Christ being equal with God and always existing. And the other thing you point out, which I think is important, is that those different views of divinity all existed in the pre-Christ world. it all exists in the ancient world. Different ways there were, there were, as you say, humans who had been taken up and become divine. There were gods, especially the Greek gods who used to like to have sex with,

and Roman gods used to have sex with mortals. And there were ones who'd be, you know, so there were all of those different kinds of Christ were prevalent in the other myths at the time. And so you have different Christians saying these things about Jesus that they were saying about various other people at the time. And but it, but it, and it's, it's a development in time. because as time goes on, Christ becomes more and more divine. But it's not a completely linear development because you have people saying,

having older views at later times and views that became prominent later, they were making earlier. And just like, you know, you can't say that if somebody believes in a 6,000-year-old world that they must be living 2,000 years ago, you've got people like that now. And so you have more advanced views early and less advanced views later. Okay, there's three other things I would be remiss if I didn't cover. One related to Jesus and then two other related to the revelations. One is a central part of all of these aspects of Christ being divine, regardless of whether it was all the time or birth or baptism.

The one thing that seems to make, and several theologians have argued this for me that the one thing that makes Christ different is the resurrection. is the resurrection is the real proof that he is at divine at whatever level divinity want to call it and and you make the important point that that the that the resurrection itself is from a historical perspective quite dubious it's not dubious you can't prove there's a resurrection but you argue that there are inconsistencies that there if you look at it it's again on this likelihood scale. It's not likely that a that someone who's crucified would even be buried in general, much less it's, is it likely that that Pontius Pilate who if you look at him as a historic figure, whatever let have let the Jewish priests have his body for that. And I mean,

you go through what's reasonable at that time to say, you know, aside from what people have visions of, you can never, I mean, it was Jonathan Sachs, I guess, or no, Oliver Sacks once said, not Jonathan Sacks, the rabbi, but Oliver Sacks, the psychologist, the psychologist, one said that, you know, when people have hallucinations, they're real. So don't, you know, they're just as real as reality. So when people have visions, yeah, I'm willing to, I don't want to debate that. But the other historical aspects of the tomb, all of that are historically debatable. They are. The first, the starting point, of course, you start with your sources and see what the sources say about an event. And when it comes to the resurrection stories, all you have to do is

read what Matthew says, what Mark says, what Luke's, and read like in detail. They're contradicting each other all over the map in ways that cannot be reconciled. And so the sources, they all agree that Jesus was buried on a Friday and raised on a Saturday. But then when you start looking at historical evidence for those things, it really gets tricky because the Romans didn't allow crucify. victims to be buried. This is part of the punishment. They left them to to to to to to rot on the cross and to be eaten by scavengers as part of the punishment. So people will see, you know, if you want to you you want to defy Rome, okay, well, this is what you can expect then. And so, so the very idea of him being buried that afternoon and then is is problematic. The stories of his

appearances are problematic. So everything, everything is hugely problematic. And the interesting thing is that when you actually dig through the materials, again, if you line them up chronologically and figure what comes first, it does look like very, the earliest things people were saying was not that there was an empty tomb. The earliest thing they were saying is that we saw Jesus. And so that's where you get to your visions. And I think people did have visions. I mean, I think, you know, Oliver Saxon. He wrote a really interesting book on this. Yeah, yeah, a whole book. Hallucination. Yeah. Yeah. And but people have these things. And they, always think that they're true. But the thing is, this is the key point that even theologians don't

quite yet, which is that if a follower of Jesus who was a Jew who believed that the end was coming soon and that the end would involve a judgment day in which everybody who had ever lived would be raised from the dead for judgment. This is what Jesus taught. It's what his disciples firmly believed that the end of time was coming soon with a resurrection. They didn't believe that when you died, your soul would go to heaven or hell. They didn't think your body and soul could exist separately. If those people came to think Jesus came back to life, their category was that his soul has come back into his body and he's been raised from the dead. They couldn't interpret it that he's gone to heaven and his spirit has come down.

And so they naturally interpreted as a resurrection. So it all does go back to these divisions. And you're right. You can't debate them. people see what they see but there's nothing historical that can suggest. Well, the visions, yeah, so we'll accept that people have visions, but people have visions today so you can be suspect. But what I found interesting was the rather interesting and clever history looking at the context. As you point out, it's context, context, context, and the context of the time

is that the tomb being empty and the fact even being a tomb is suspect. And the other thing you point out, which I found him mentioning, because I keep thinking, how are these people who are evangelical people try and convince people or i would say con people into believing this stuff and i was intrigued that okay why do they have women discover him and because there aren't many women in the in the bible you point out well from many points of view that's a really good psychological tool to say that the women discover him you want to want to mention that well evangelicals often say look those stories must be historically right because nobody would invent a story of women covering a tomb.

Because if you want to really show that you'd have the men do it. And man, is that ever wrong? I mean, for one thing, you know, a lot of Christians are attacked early on for being largely a group of women. And they're like more women than men. And you ask who would make up a story of women discovering a tomb? Well, you know, maybe women, for example. And the other thing is our earliest version of the story is all about our earliest version of the

stories in the gospel of Mark. And Mark's gospel, the entire gospel is trying to show that the men disciples of Jesus never could figure him out. They just couldn't understand who he was. And so it would make perfect sense for the men not to discover the tomb. They're the ones who can't figure him out. That's the point of the story. And so who would make it, well, Mark would make it up. And so there are lots of people who would make it up. And I give a lot more of that in the book. So I don't think it's a good argument. I don't think these people are coning people. I think they might be conning themselves, but they, I think they really, a con artist is somebody who knows that they're wrong. Yeah, you know, these people are not kind of con others because they believe it. In fact,

as Feynman once said, the easiest person to fool is yourself. So once you really believe it, it's really easy to find ways to try and convince others, which is what they didn't kind of believe at the beginning of the program is that I think the people who know there, these contradictions just say, well, it's okay because the story is really true at some level. And I don't want to dwell on the contradictions. I want to get you to believe it. And then we can talk about it. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I know. I know. Anyway, no. Well, that's probably write my books because I think, you know, people need to realize that, you know, they're just, I have no objection to people being Christian at all. Zero. But, but I think, you know, you really ought to know, no historical facts.

And you, it's better to be informed about the problems than to stick your head in the sand. I mean, you know, if you're not an informed Christian, you're an ignorant Christian, who wants to be ignorant. Well, I think most people, well, I think most people want to be. I think you're probably right. Well, we'll get to that. I think most people find that, well, you know, the, the Dawkins Foundation did a study of people. At one point in the census in England about a decade ago, they asked for people's religion, you know, and they asked. And so the people listed that they were Church of England, they somehow they contacted people.

And they said, okay, so why do you believe in transsubstantiation? should believe in the virgin birth, they go, no, no, no, no, no. Well, why do you call yourself a Christian? And I like to think of myself as a good person. So it's ultimately, I think, as you say, people read and take what they want from it and pick and choose and don't take the things they don't believe. And that's most Christians, you know, except the absolutely literalest ones, say, I'm willing to just sort of, I find it makes me a good person. And that's why I call myself a Christian. Let's let's the other the other thing that you point out, which is so important in the new book, in the newer book, Armageddon, is that and at the end of the at the end of the, at the beginning and end of the how Jesus became God, you point out, Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher. He was, his main role was predicting that the end was near. He's like the guys you see on the street now with the signs up. The only difference is that they don't have as big a following. Maybe who knows in a thousand years. But, but, but, uh, So he was a guy who was going around saying the end is near, not repent so much, but basically repent, you know, be good because the end is near.

And he really, at least believed it in what he said and the people around have believed it. And revelations, which is now through the rapture and in every era seems to be viewed as now there are signs that there's a revelation, that the end is near, was really written. by someone who believed the end was near. And this was then, and it was about to happen. And it probably, and, well, so why don't you go into that? Yeah. So my book on Armageddon tries to explain what Revelation really says. And one thing it does not say is that there's a rapture coming.

Yeah, that's amazing. That's made up. And you can actually date when that idea came out in 1833. Yeah, it's amazing when I read that. It's because, again, it seems like such a sense. part of what so many people talk about. People say, there's evangelicals believe it, but it's not rooted in the Bible at all. And I go through the passages where people say, oh, that's talking about the rapture.

And I should, yeah, actually, it's not. Yeah, and you make it quite clear. And again, in historical context that it's not. It's not. And I mean, Revelation is written by somebody who thinks it's going to come soon. And the problem is that people continue to, you know, many evangelicals and fundamentalists think it's still coming soon. And if you point out that, you know, well, John, you know, John said it was coming soon, but he was living 2,000 years ago.

Yeah. Then they come up with, you know, things like, well, they quote the book of second Peter with the Lord, a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day. I say, okay, well, if that's right, then, you know, if Jesus is coming in three days, you can start looking for him in 5,023. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, but, you know, yeah. So part of my argument in the book is that both Jesus and John of Patmos, the guy wrote Revelation, agreed that the end was coming soon and that it would bring destruction and it would bring salvation. But I think that apart from the general apocalyptic framework that they shared with lots of other Jews in their day, apart from that, they are radically different than how they understood it.

and that John actually is not embracing Jesus teachings at all. I think he's in fact arguing a contrary position to Jesus about God, about love, and about how to live in this world and how to be. Yeah, in fact, you point out, well, there's two things there. One is you spent a bunch of chapters, which I was hoping I went for and they were there. You know, I've had a discussion with my friend, Noam Chomsky,

about belief, you know, and I've been a vocal. I've been vocal about my views about belief. But, and he points out he doesn't care what people think. It's what they do that matters. And I can't help. Of course, how can I disagree? The problem is that what people think affects what they do. And as you point out, in a wide variety of ways,

misinterpreting revelations has resulted in bad actions. Those actions being everything from not buying into, climate change, you know, saying it doesn't matter. You know, humans aren't going to affect the earth because it's going to end soon to other areas where you're really actually hurting people in a real way. It's done this idea that the ends coming soon has done huge psychological damage to, I know a lot of evangelicals, ex-evangelicals who are psychologically damaged by the idea that Jesus is coming back soon and thinking they knew when it was going to happen, it didn't happen,

and just really messed up their heads. Sometimes it's led to huge violence. People don't realize that we're celebrating, celebrating the 30-year anniversary of the Waco disaster. And that was driven in large part by David Koresh's interpretation of revelations being fulfilled in his day. Yeah, you talk about that in great detail. I was taken by that. And also, I mean, I knew that I hear, you know, I know you can't help but know if you fell out of the news. how evangelicals view Israel and the Christian Zionism as being the fulfillment of a prediction from revelations.

But what I guess I hadn't realized so much was in some sense how that the Middle East is a source of constant strife in the world. And if you have to think of one place where the flame, you know, the spark might happen that would cause much greater problem. It's the Middle East. But in some sense, the Middle East was designed through the Balfour Declaration. some sense by evangelicals to say we want before you can have the return the second coming you we need Israel to be the Jews to come back to Israel and the temple to be rebuilt so the first step is to create an Israel in some sense that whole political problem arose because of a of a of a belief in revelations and the predictions of the second coming yeah so you know in the book I don't take a stand on the Israeli Palestinian issue because that's yeah it's just you know that's a worm

that it's too messy. But what I do do is explain the historical support of evangelicals for Israel. And even many evangelicals don't understand what the real roots are. And there was Christian Zionism before there was what we think of as Zionism in the 19th century because Christians were convinced that the prophets had predicted that Israel had to be had to return to the land. And so they predicted that Israel had to come back back to the land. And so the Balford Declaration is all rooted completely in that. But then there's another part of this, which you alluded to, in the New Testament, it indicates that the Antichrist figure who's going to rise up at the end of time is going to go into the temple of Jerusalem and declare himself God. Well, there is no temple in Jerusalem.

It was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70. And where the temple was, is where the dome of the rock is now in the temple mount. And so fundamentalist Christians are convinced that Israel has to take over the temple mount and destroy the dome of the rock, this very, very important Islamic holy place, and build the temple again before Jesus can come back. Well, how's that going to happen exactly?

Yeah, without really leading to World War III. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's incredibly dangerous. Well, I want to move the end here to something interesting because you point out the other aspect of revelations, which is almost amusing if it weren't tragic. And Waco is an example of that. It's throughout history, you have people who are saying, I have evidence the end is near. I know what day. And you have great stories about people who say October, September 21st.

No, no, no, no, no. No, the 22nd. And then when it doesn't happen, you point out it doesn't matter. people they get more convinced and and you explain in terms of a psychological study on cognitive dissonance and and i i want to read this quote because it resonated me with me in a way that was slightly different than maybe you intended you said if more people acknowledge you're right it eases the psychological trauma of knowing that you're probably wrong so you so you set out to win over other devotees to me i can't help but think

that that is part of the reason that church is necessary in general. Hugh Downs, who you and I know because we're old enough, Hugh Downs, became a good friend of mine late in his life. And he said to me, I think that's the reason you need to go to church every day because these stories are so ridiculous, that you suspect in your heart at some level they're not true. And you need to overcome that psychological trauma by by, by, you know, being part with others who believe that, and then set out to win other devotees to convince them.

So I think all of evangelicalism in some sense is a reflection of the inherent insecurity that people have, that this is probably nonsense. What do you think about that? Well, it may be right. I think there are probably ways to figure that out, but I don't know. Historians have shown that that's one of the reasons, they've argued at least, that's one of the reasons that Christianity took off in the first place. because the followers of Jesus were expecting Jesus to be the Messiah who destroyed the Romans,

and then said he got arrested and tortured to death publicly. And to kind of deal with the dissonance between what they expected to happen, what did happen. They then changed the definition of what the Messiah was and became missionary about it. And then when the second coming didn't come, the way they were expecting it to come within their generation, then they became more missionary to convince people. And so it wouldn't be surprising to me if that's still part of what's going on today. Yeah, I mean, you don't need, we don't need to go every Sunday to read quantum mechanics. Just one book, you have to read once.

But you have to go every Sunday to hear the same stories over again. I think that reinforcing is required specifically because of some level the cognitive dissonance that is religion. That's anyway, that's my. Yeah, no, you read the quantum mechanics book once. Read the quantum mechanics book once you know, yeah, I'm never going to understand this. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, you know what you're going to stand, but you don't have to, but you don't have to reread, you don't have to go every Sunday and have, and let's do it over again. And, and you either know, yeah, anyway, I really, so that, I think when I read that, I thought that sums up, not just the problem with people who predict the end of the world, but religion in general is, is you need, you need that constant reinforcement because most people, I suspect, realize these stories are just too wild. I'm not sure. You know, it, that may be right. But, but, You know, I think that most people don't have a scientific way of looking at the world and don't understand the need of evidence.

And as you know, they don't believe in proof. And they think that people are just making stuff up. And it's just because they're ignorant. You know, they're ignorant. And I don't think it's necessarily they think that it's wrong. It's just they don't, you know, they don't want to think about it much. Yeah, most people, well, that's the point. Come back again.

And I think people, as you point out, most people believe the Bible, but haven't read it because it's easy. I think it's a way of feeling, for that reason they told the census people that I don't need to believe in those details. It makes me feel a good person and something about it resonates with me, which is a lot. Sorry? It has huge implications. I mean, you know, right now with the abortion debate across the country, everybody thinks that, you know, that abortion is condemned in the Bible. And so you have these people, you know, picketing plan parenthood. And so even without taking a stand on abortion, the Bible says nothing about it.

It's not in there at all. But people wouldn't, you know, people don't read the Bible to find out. They just hear somebody quote some random verse out of context and say, oh, yeah, see, it condemns abortion. It's got nothing to do with abortion. And so it has really big implications for our, but, you know, you asked earlier why I get passionate about this stuff. Well, this is one of the reasons. I think it ends up matter. Oh, it does. And that's why I've enjoyed, I enjoy your work so much and respected so much and why I've enjoyed having the chance to talk to you. Because I think that you do, well, as I said, you're doing God's work, as Steve Weinberg would say. Because it is important for people to understand the context of something. It affects so many people's lives. But that's why I want to just end with the last question, which is a personal one in some sense. And I hope you'll take it the right way.

So you're right. Well, of course you're right because you know these things. Abortion is mentioned in the Bible. But what is often mentioned in the Bible in the Old Testament and New Testament, especially in Revelations, is that, you know, this God condones atrocities. And that God, at least in the sense of revelation, is supposed to be Jesus. And Jesus talks about judgment. And, you know, sure, and, you know, in the Old Testament, there's explicit violence.

And as you point out, there's tons of explicit. to violence in revelations. So, so yeah, Jesus talks about love the neighbor and and, and, and turn the other cheek. But he also basically said, you're going to be judged. And if you don't believe in me, you're, you're, you're, you're, it's fundamentally a statement of fear of, of, if, you know, believe in me to because I'll make you afraid if you're not. And I'll, you know, I'll kill your children or whatever if, if, if, if you don't as, as is said in it in there explicitly. So, but you, basically say you personally find, you personally like Jesus and the message. And I'm wondering,

and I'm wondering, is that, is that because of, is that just a remnant of a long experience of finding that Jesus helped make you a good person when you were younger? Or do you still, as an intellectual exercise, find Jesus ultimately to be a positive figure? So it gets, my answer is a little complicated because it's a little bit hard for people who to kind of get their mind around it. But the Jesus you described as out for blood, and if you don't believe me, you're going to be roasted. I absolutely do not, do not admire that Jesus. I don't think that's what Jesus himself was like. when I talk about appreciating Jesus and his message,

I'm saying that as a historian who appreciates the conclusions of my historical research so that I don't think the Jesus of Revelation is at all like the historical Jesus was. I don't think that Jesus of the Gospel of John was at all like the historical Jesus was. As we were talking about earlier, you know, you have these different sources and different gospels

and you have to figure out what's historically right. when I do that just independently of what I personally believe, which is nothing really about Jesus today, I just think he was a man. But apart from that, when I do that analysis, what looks to me is that Jesus did think the end was coming soon. And it's, you know, we absolutely can fault him for that. He was wrong.

The end was not coming in his generation. That's completely wrong. I give him, I cut him a little bit of a break on that. for the same reason that I cut people a break today if they happen to be capitalists. It's not as if they've got something else that they could see as a viable alternative. I mean, it's not like, you know, they've heard about socialism. They think it's the same thing as Marxism. I mean, you know, it's like, you know, they grow up in a certain way.

Well, Jesus grew up in an apocalyptic environment. So I'm going to grant him that part of it. Okay. So I don't, I don't, I don't share his apocalyptic view. but the way that apocalyptic view worked out for him was distinctive, I think, and not like these other people that we know about, not very much like them. I don't think Jesus said anything about anybody believing in him. I don't think that was part of the pitch at all. Jesus did think that people needed to mend their ways, and especially he thought that the kinds of oppression and cruelty and injustice that was going on in the world,

was not good and that people needed to turn away from that. And I think Jesus really did teach that you needed to treat other people well and that the way you would be approved by God and enter into the kingdom, which is, you know, if you get rid of all that mythology, if you really want to be the kind of human being that you should be, it is by giving of yourself for others and not just living a selfish, self-centered, self-aggrandizing life. And I don't do very good with that. I'm extremely self-aggrandizing. But I do like that message. And I like the idea that I should try to help people who are in need and just not try and screw over everybody so that I can get ahead. And I think Jesus really stood for that. And I think he thought that those who helped those in need,

whatever they believed, they were the people who were in the right. And that's what I believe. Well, all I can say is amen to that. Literally and metaphorically. No, and I think that, and I guess it's wonderful to, first of all, I appreciate tremendously the time you've taken and the scholarship and the good you've done for all of us by helping us understand things. But I guess, and the wonderful thing is that we can both agree with that, that philosophy. I argue that I arise there from reason and not faith, but at the end result is the same. And I, and I, anyway.

I mean, look, Emmanuel Kant, or, you know, deontological ethics or John Stuart Mill, you'll tell them, these are not built on Christian premises, but they could lead to a very similar view. And so I'm good with that, and it probably is a remnant. I mean, this is what I, you know, Jesus is, you know, is my remnant, not Kantian philosophy. Yeah, exactly. Given your background, but it's nice to see we've come to the same place.

And, you know, thanks. It has been such a pleasure and a privilege to talk to you. And I hope I did some justice to your work. And I really think that the discussion we had, I hope it will get people thinking, which is the whole point of this. And hope you enjoyed it as well. Well, I enjoyed it very much, and thank you, because it's really nice to talk to somebody who's just a brilliant scholar in a completely different field, but with, you know, can actually engage with what struck me as the really important questions for the kind of thing I do. Oh, that's an honor. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the college. by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century

and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more, please visit Originsproject Foundation.org